In 2023, the top 20 donors to GiveWell gave more than the other 31,890 donors combined. These donors gave at least $1 million each with a mean of $5.87 million.

With stats like these, I mostly view the 10% pledge as a social commitment device rather than a sensible rule for how much to donate. One can think of the 10% pledge as requiring people to give up a constant amount of personal utility under logarithmic utility of consumption. But this doesn't make sense; one should obviously give up more utility if beneficiaries gain more per unit you sacrifice. [1][2]

Is there something better that captures the extreme variance in salary these days, eg with junior AI engineers earning >$1M/year? I propose a power law where someone with income Y should donate everything except a consumption budget _C = X·(Y/X)^γ_. Then the donation rate is calculated as _1 - (X/Y)^{(1-γ)}_.

With parameters somewhat arbitrarily set such that the median American household (income $75K) donates 10% and someone with $10M income donates 60%, we get _X approx $39.3k_ and γ ≈ 0.83, meaning that every 1% increase in income allows you a 0.83% increase in consumption. We get the following [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.